He stared down at the snapshot, his teeth clenched against the flood-tide of emotion which took him unawares at sight of it. He was not often homesick, not since his Spartan schooldays had imposed an agony of longing for the privacy and solitude of that gable room. And for the past ten years, at least, he had been pretty busy, all over the world, wherever his job took him.

He had missed England, of course—missed the serene, unhurried, green-clad background of the cool English countryside, where it is still possible to forget that the twentieth century has got a bit out of hand, and to conceive a world miraculously empty of machines. And sometimes he had thought of England with a kind of gratitude, or rather a thanksgiving that such a place still existed in a complicated modern world—a place where a man’s home was still more or less his castle, where a people with jolly, unfurtive faces still lined the curbs to cheer a smiling, friendly ruler who was still His Majesty, and where spring still came so sweetly in secluded lanes and unregimented villages.

Often and often he had thought of England, when he was half across the world—tenderly, as a man may think of his mother, striving in his small and solitary way to keep her safe as she was, protected, and provided for. Oh, yes, he thought of England.... In Egypt once, when he had sought out the Sphinx for company, and derived a solemn sort of comfort from its vast immemorial loneliness; in China, where the heat and smells and miserable millions of passive mankind had set him pondering on things it is no good thinking about.... But he had never before experienced anything like the persistent nostalgia which had begun to dog him recently, drawing him back, not just to England, but to that gaunt house in the Mendips.

True, he had left it in a great hurry, at a sudden call from the Home Office. He had not stopped to put anything away in his room at the top of the house. His country clothes were left hanging in the wardrobe, his books were strewn about, he had not even locked up his letters and papers. Worst of all, he had left his favorite pipe behind.